Vendors continue to roll out virtualization software in the days leading up to the VMworld show, the largest virtualization-focused tech conference, to be held Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 in San Francisco.
Embotics and Surgient on Aug. 27 announced a partnership designed to give users greater life-cycle management and self-service provisioning capabilities in their virtualized environments. Officials with the companies said the combination of their products gives customers greater control over their growing virtualization infrastructures.
On the same day, VMLogix unveiled the latest version of its flagship product, LabManager 3.8, designed to make it easier for test and development teams to deploy production-ready virtual environments across virtualization platforms. LabManager 3.8 also offers support for VMware’s vSphere 4 platform.
Both announcements came two days after VKernel rolled out a package of software that officials say will enable users to increase the efficiency of their virtualized environments.
To Embotics and Surgient officials, problems arise when IT departments, using a variety of manual controls, are unable to keep up with the growth of their virtualized environments. The result is that users, frustrated by the lack of services from the IT department, start creating their own virtual machines outside of IT’s control.
Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform gives IT administrators greater automation of key aspects, such as predefined virtual configurations accessed through a portal, the companies said. Users also can more easily get the resources they need from infrastructure pools managed by the IT staff, which lessens the need to create rogue VMs.
For its part, Embotics’ V-Commander gives IT administrators greater insight and control over their virtualized infrastructures, making it easier for them to find such rogue VMs and bring them under the purview of the IT department.
“The combination of Surgient’s self-service provisioning and management platform with our automation and control reduces support costs, increases operational flexibility and enables enterprise IT to scale virtual environments in a safe and secure manner,” Jay Litkey, president and CEO of Embotics, said in a statement.
VMLogix officials said their LabManager product can help businesses reduce the time and IT resources needed to create applications. Included in Version 3.8 is support for VMware’s vCenter Server 4.0 and vSphere, giving users the latest in VMware’s virtualization offerings and access to such management capabilities as VMotion, which enables users to more easily move VMs from one physical host to another.
In addition, the new version supports the shared cluster capabilities in Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology, lets users set custom firewall rules and enables users to deploy IP-zoned enabled LabManager configurations to be deployed across multiple physical machines.
For its part, VKernel’s Optimization Pack offers three applets aimed at improving the efficiency of a business’ virtual infrastructure. The applets-Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory-enable businesses to run more VMs on the same amount of physical hardware, reduce wasted storage and virtualization sprawl, and improve the performance of the VMs. The applets are delivered as a virtual appliance.
Wastefinder hunts down such issues as zombie VMs and expired snapshots that waste resources such as processor power, memory and storage. Rightsizer brings the amount of resources in line with the demands of VMs to improve densities and performance.
Inventory gathers all the data about the VMs in the environment and creates a detailed report to give users a view into their virtual infrastructure. The reports are continually updated.
VKernel’s products currently support VMware’s ESX and vSphere platforms, with plans to add support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix Systems’ XenServer in the future.